After Donald Trump echoed both Hitler and Mussolini in a Veterans Day speech, saying, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Republicans defended him with a "both sides" argument, pointing to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” comment. But Republicans didn’t need to work very hard to defend Trump—because the media wasn’t paying attention to begin with.
A newMedia Matters analysis compares television and newspaper coverage of Trump’s Nazi-flavored pledge to exterminate his political opponents with Clinton’s lumping of “half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” Clinton’s comment was big news. Trump’s, not so much.